RFID Applications and Security Review

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is widely used in several contexts, such as logistics, supply chains, asset tracking, and health, among others, therefore drawing the attention of many researchers. This paper presents a review of the most cited topics regarding RFID focused on applications, security, and privacy. A total of 62,685 records were downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus core databases and processed, reconciling the datasets to remove duplicates, resulting in 40,677 unique elements. Fundamental indicators were extracted and are presented, such as the citation number, average growth rate, and average number of documents per year. We extracted the top topics and reviewed the relevant indicators using a free Python tool, ScientoPy. The results are discussed in the following sections: the first is the Applications Section, whose subsections are the Internet of Things (IoT), Supply Chain Management, Localization, Traceability, Logistics, Ubiquitous Computing, Healthcare, and Access Control; the second is the Security and Privacy section, whose subsections are Authentication, Privacy, and Ownership Transfer; finally, we present the Discussion section. This paper intends to provide the reader with a global view of the current status of trending RFID topics and present different analyses from different perspectives depending on motivations or background.